Jilted lover has final word as party man forced out

Malcolm Moore

BEIJING: A senior Communist Party policy adviser has been forced to resign after his jilted lover posted online a 120,000-word account of their affair.

Since December, the hushed and scholarly corridors of the Communist Party's Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, one of its most important policy units, have buzzed with gossip about its bespectacled 54-year-old director, Yi Junqing.

Mr Yi, an owlish former propaganda chief in northern China, had overseen the bureau for two years. But since October 2011 he had been romancing 34-year-old Chang Yan, a married post-doctorate researcher.

At the end of last year, one month after their final amorous liaison, Mrs Chang wrote an emotional account of their affair and posted it online.

The Xinhua news agency sent out a terse report on Thursday that Mr Yi had been dismissed for his ''improper life style''.

Mr Yi had once nursed lofty ambitions. ''I am quite talented after all,'' he confided to Mrs Chang last February after one of their meetings in the XiXi Friendship Hotel. ''Xi Jinping [China's incoming president] and Li Yuanchao [the former head of the party's HR department] have a good impression of me.''

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He counted several of China's most senior leaders among his network of contacts, including the brother of Ling Jihua, the former chief of staff to outgoing president Hu Jintao.

But even before he hired Mrs Chang, a graduate of the Marxism College of Renmin university, Mr Yi was undone.

''We went to a Japanese restaurant,'' she recorded, in August 2011.

''He had two bottles of sake. I was trying to figure out what he wanted, money or me. I knew I would have to pay one way or another to work at the bureau. In fact, I had already paid 10,000 yuan ($1,527). He said he would hire me within two months. I drank a lot and I felt excited.''

By December, Mrs Chang had a job and Mr Yi had a lover.

''He went to the bathroom and I took everything off apart from my underwear. When he returned, I was lying under the duvet, blushing,'' she wrote.

As rumours of their affair began to leak out last year, Mr Yi had second thoughts. He sent one of his deputies to give Mrs Chang the brush-off, suggesting that if she left Beijing and returned to her home city of Taiyuan, in Shanxi province, they would arrange for a professorship at a local university.

''He said in the future I should hide my opinions and my body too. I was almost heartbroken and I went back to Taiyuan,'' she wrote.

Scorned, Mrs Chang posted online her entire account, including dates for each of their 17 encounters.

Later, she took it down, claiming that it was a work of fiction. But the damage was done.

Since it was founded in the 1950s, the CCTB has grown from its roots as the official translator of the works of Marx, Engels and Stalin into Chinese to become a key party think tank.